As the body of information available via the World Wide Web (“the web”) expands, typical computer users spend more time exploring and retrieving information available on the web. Information is typically accessed by visiting a web site, which is a group of web pages accessed via a common top level domain name. As part of this process, users form opinions of a large number of web sites. For example, a user visiting a merchant's web site might decide that the merchant offers a particularly generous return policy. As another example, a user visiting a health information web site might determine that the health information web site provides easily-understood articles on a variety of health issues. Because of the high rate at which users encounter web sites of interest, it is generally very difficult for users to remember these web sites and the URLs used to access them without some form of assistance.
To assist a user in remembering web sites of interest to the user, typical web browsers provide limited functionality to enable a user to capture information about the web sites that the user visited. Some browsers enable a user to create “bookmarks” for web sites that enable the user to quickly return to those web sites. Because creating and categorizing a usable bookmark typically requires a user to complete a number of steps, however, most users only create bookmarks for a small number of web sites that they have visited. Web sites that are typically bookmarked include those that the user visits repeatedly, often a small subset of the sites that may be of interest to a user. Other browsers maintain a history of all web pages or all web sites visited by a user. Because such a history lists all web pages or web sites the user visited, though, it does not enable the user to differentiate visited web sites that were of interest from visited web sites that were not of interest.
A general shortcoming of both bookmarks and history lists is that a user must remember that the user previously bookmarked or viewed a site, and must access the bookmark or history file in order to find the site again. Neither functionality operates in a manner in which the browser provides information to inform the user that they have previously viewed a particular site and found the particular site to be of interest. As a result, a user browsing the web who encounters a web site or a link to a web site that the user earlier visited and determined to be of interest would be unlikely to associate the link with the user's earlier interest in the web site. In this way, the user can lose valuable information that might have otherwise encouraged them to follow the link.
For the reasons outlined above, a system that assisted users in capturing and taking advantage of information about web sites of interest would have significant utility.